By Richard Robinson, CEO Cynalytica | May 18th, 2021
I am extremely pleased to announce the release and availability of an industry first solution for the safe and secure continuous monitoring and protection of legacy critical industrial controls as a Managed Service Platform, OT OptICS
With current, and let us hope sustained, attention being brought to protecting Critical Infrastructure and Industrial Control Systems we, at Cynalytica, wanted to provide a timely and tangible solution to help operators identify and mitigate the risks and threats to Critical Infrastructure giving them better situational awareness and not just waxing on philosophically about the problem(s).
In working with several government agencies in testing and deployments, we recognized that on the commercial side of deployments, many companies lack much of the required resources and skills, (that the government may have), to deploy, maintain, and integrate the monitoring of these systems into their current operations effectively and efficiently. These constraints have led us to offer our solution as a managed service for network and security operation centers to help our critical infrastructure quickly and confidently close this gap.
An industry first, OT OptICS™, is a ML/AI-driven cybersecurity platform for serial-connected ICS and delivers continuous monitoring, inspection, and alerting capabilities for legacy critical infrastructure control systems.
There continues to be an unlimited number of challenges confronting our critical infrastructure operators. A few of them still being that:
- Operational Technology attacks are substantially more sophisticated and persistent than is being represented publicly and they are much more frequent.
- The rate of adversarial cyber offensive capabilities are drastically outpacing cyber defense protection awareness, skills, and resources.
- The US Government has had a long-standing awareness of cyber vulnerabilities to legacy critical infrastructure. These have been repeatedly and clearly articulated, however any response has been kept to small pockets and unfortunately “slow-rolled” at an institutional level.
- Companies quickly need to get a better understanding and appreciation of their ICS and OT environments before continuing with their digital transformation endeavours. They need to quickly reassess and re-allocate their cybersecurity investment portfolios and consider more effective OT monitoring. All while recognizing/accepting there will be diminishing returns in certain areas of their IT cybersecurity.
With challenges posed by the increased proliferation of ransomware attacks, heightened concerns about supply chain comprises, an unequivocal inability to catch every sophisticated cyber adversary, combined with the rapid rate of IT/OT connectivity – you are probably coming to grips with the reality that an adversary may already be in your network. With OT OptICS™, we can help you change the equation by better, more effective, and efficient monitoring.